It never gets old hearing about how Quest Performance Monitoring solutions offer actionable insight to mission-critical systems. Upon visiting a customer for a 'health check' of their environment, we had the pleasure of learning about two distinct ways Spotlight is providing value for them. The DBA Team Lead shared a recent experience in which Spotlight was instrumental in maintaining peak performance of their SQL Servers.

A Tableau report was running consuming high resources on the SQL Server leaving minimal resources for BI operations. He said it was easy to use Spotlight to get additional statistics like Memory, CPU, wait events etc. to identify and diagnose the corresponding offensive query. He went on to say that with the information Spotlight provided, it allowed him to more accurately optimize the SQL Server environment taking the execution times from over an hour to just minutes. Efficient BI operations were restored.

Here is a sample Workload Analysis interface in Spotlight that allows users to perform 'dimensional drilldowns' by database, application, user, host or statement for custom time frames.

As analysis is a primary function of the team, the DBAs said Spotlight has also been useful generating Analysis reports. They explained that having the ability to capture, organize, and summarize monitoring data helps them make informed decisions around database management. Several reports were mentioned... Database Growth, SQL Server IO, SQL Server Performance Summary, Windows Performance Summary, SQL Server Database Space, SQL Server Memory, and Windows Memory. We discussed the idea of leveraging the SQL Server and Windows 'Metric' reports to allow for customized metric selection. Additionally, they shared that they are considering integrating the Spotlight reports with SSRS (SQLServer Reporting Services) to take advantage of report subscriptions (report scheduling).

Here is a sample subset list of Spotlight reports and a sample Database Growth report.